Is Bath a sustainable city?
Bath has a population of around 80,000. It is world heritage city and receives over 2,000,000 tourists a year. It is also an important regional shopping area and serves a large area around it. It is a wealthy city, with house prices considerably above the national average and a high proportion of 'professional' and high earning individuals. Bath has much history surrounding it, and the Roman's aspect is one that attracts many visitors. The Roman baths are one of the top historical monuments in the UK, attracting over 890,000 visitors a year. The cultural attractions of the city have led too much recent in migration and bath is under increasing pressure to meet residents’ demands for affordable accommodation, transport and services. The city has a wide range of problems trying to meet these demands as Bath is located in the steep-sided Avon valley and there is little flat land available for large-scale development. Furthermore, as well as having a protected historic core, bath is surrounded by green belt, which restricts urban sprawl, in this case towards nearby Bristol and surrounding towns. To the east, much of the countryside falls in the Cotswolds area of outstanding natural beauty, limiting development to village infill. As a consequence, Bath has a real shortage of affordable housing, even lower than the nationally low figure for the south west of 16% of the total housing stock. Bath also needs to safeguard land for industrial development, as it is over reliant on the fickle tourist sector. A housing programme which has which has pioneering innovations for sustainable and a efficient living is the Greenwich Millennium Village, which has combated the problem that Bath is facing by constructing a housing development on the Eastern side of the Greenwich Peninsula adjacent to the River Thames. It has 1377 homes of which 20% will be affordable housing units, as well as approx. 5000 square meters of commercial space. The project comprises of 1079 apartments and 298 houses.